Authors paddle like mad to write latest literary wave

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Moving from her "green room" inside a wave to the writers' green
room of a literary festival, Nike Bourke yesterday joined a wave of
new Australian surfing writing.

At the Byron Bay writers' festival the Brisbane author launched
her second novel, The True Green Of Hope, a book that found
its inspiration in a peculiar effect of light known as the "green
ray".

Described by Jules Verne in his book Le Rayon Vert as the
colour that green would be in paradise, the effect is produced by
sunlight in sea water when certain conditions of latitude, weather
and humidity coincide with a sunset or sunrise.

Verne wrote: "Happiness will be the portion of those who behold
this spectacle."

Bourke, now 36 and a creative writing teacher, searched for the
green ray and saw it while surfing at sunset in Western Australia
several years ago. A kind of happiness followed, in the form of the
conception and execution of her novel.

The recent trend of surfing literature includes a biography of
the Australian great Michael Peterson, an anthology of surf writing
published last year and another coming out this year, an
autobiography of Mark Occhilupo on its way, various how-to books
and the Victorian writer Fiona Capp's Kibble Award-winning memoir
That Oceanic Feeling.

Byron Bay's eight-year-old festival is drawing large crowds this
weekend, with featured authors including Robert Drewe (launching
his novel Grace), Kate Grenville, Matthew Reilly, Delia
Falconer, Christos Tsiolkas and the actor/writer William
McInnes.

On Thursday night the barrister and writer Julian Burnside,
echoing Emile Zola's century-old pamphlet J'Accuse, told the
festival that the Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock, was "not a fit
person" to practise as a lawyer in NSW and "for what he did as
immigration minister, could be charged with offences under the new
anti-terrorism legislation. The only problem is, the person to
bring that action against him would have to be Philip Ruddock,
Attorney-General."